6,000 Pfizer vaccine doses expected next week
Peterborough will be receiving 6,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine next week, medical officer of health Dr. Rosana Salvaterra says, which is the largest batch of vaccine against COVID-19 to arrive here yet.
The first two shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine — from Moderna — arrived in late January and early February.
That provided enough vaccine to offer all 979 residents in all eight long-term-care homes in Peterborough city and county their first dose of vaccine.
Now the city and county are awaiting further shipments of Moderna vaccine by late next week to start giving those second doses to residents in longterm care, Salvaterra said at a virtual press briefing on the pandemic Tuesday.
She said there’s “a quite urgent need” for those Moderna follow-up vaccines, since the second dose must be administered within 28 days from the first (and must be from the same manufacturer as the initial dose received).
The 6,000 Pfizer doses could potentially arrive in time to continue immunizing people starting Feb. 24 or 25, Salvaterra said.
That’s expected to allow the rollout of vaccine for others, such as staff and essential caregivers of people living in
long-term care, and perhaps also people living in retirement homes or some highpriority health-care workers.
Indigenous populations are also high priority to receive vaccine, but it was unclear to Salvaterra early on Tuesday whether Moderna of Pfizer will be used for Curve Lake and Hiawatha First Nations.
She said Moderna has been used for remote communities in Ontario because it’s stable for longer once thawed, but it may be that the Pfizer vaccine is more available — and therefore might be used for the First Nation communities in the Peterborough Public Health jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, CBC reported on Tuesday afternoon — following the health unit’s media briefing at noon — that winter weather in the U.S. may delay the next Pfizer vaccine shipments to Canada by a day.
Women and Gender Equality Minister Maryam Monsef, the MP for Peterborough-Kawartha, was at the noon press briefing and said Pfizer vaccine deliveries to Canada “are ramping back up again” after a delay when the company had to upgrade one of its manufacturing plants.
She said deliveries to Canada will increase “significantly” through the spring and summer, and in the meantime asked citizens to continue with the public health guidelines such as physical distancing.
“We need to keep doing what we’ve been doing — even better — so we can get through to a better spring and a better summer,” she said.